APPLYING MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Machine learning deals with the issue of how to build programs that improve their performance at some task through experience. Machine learning algorithms have proven to be of great practical value in a variety of application domains. They are particularly useful for (a) poorly understood problem domains where little knowledge exists for the humans to develop effective algorithms; (b) domains where there are large databases containing valuable implicit regularities to be discovered; or (c) domains where programs must adapt to changing conditions. Not surprisingly, the field of software engineering turns out to be a fertile ground where many software development tasks could be formulated as learning problems and approached in terms of learning algorithms. In this paper, we first take a look at the characteristics and applicability of some frequently utilized machine learning algorithms. We then provide formulations of some software development tasks using learning algorithms. Finally, a brief summary is given of the existing work.